The 30 Best Grunge Albums of All Time

The music world experienced one of its periodic resets in the early 1990s, when a curiously named phenomenon soon to be known as Grunge wiped clean the slate of popular trends and ushered in a thrilling few years of intense creativity and reinvention.

Just as the original rock 'n' roll pioneers had done in the 1950s, the Beatles in the ‘60s, punk rockers in the ‘70s, and metallic head-bangers in the ‘80s, this latest generation of rebel artists rudely rejected almost all that had come before -- only Grunge conveniently actually reflected its name with onomatopoeic accuracy.

It sounded just like you said it.

And it burned both briefly and brightly (and locally, given its intrinsic but not exclusive ties to the bustling city of Seattle and its surrounding areas), thoroughly dominating not only the musical but cultural landscape of the 1990s, while transforming the world views, life philosophies and even the basic wardrobes of an entire generation.

For perhaps the last time, since the Internet subsequently splintered the planet with infinite multimedia choices, scores of young people were defined and unified by the music they worshipped, and that’s why the legacy of Grunge remains strong, decades after its grip upon the public conscience started to weaken.

So, the time is ripe to revisit this exciting period in music with our picks for the Top 30 Grunge Albums of All Time in the gallery above.